Hello Wabbitwhy, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms there is something to call out, it seems you did two pages of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You're drawing your forms with smooth confident lines and doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

You're doing a good job with the ellipses, they're pretty well aligned and I can see you're experimenting with varying their degree.

I will ask you to submit a page of organic forms with contour curves before moving forward, to check in on how you're doing with that exercise, as sometimes students do very well with the ellipses but struggle with the curves.

Moving on to your insect constructions, I think you're developing a sense for how your forms exist in 3D space and connect together with specific relationships. Your spider constructions are feeling quite solid and three dimensional.

I do have some points that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

Firstly, it is important that the first forms you draw to start any given construction are dead simple. As discussed here on the lesson intro page, we want to establish forms that feel solid and 3D before moving forward. Usually we'll use balls and/or sausage forms for this. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer (and you) to understand how it exists in 3D space, and the more likely it is to feel flat. I've marked an example here where you started with something pretty complex for the thorax, skipping over the first step of establishing simple solid forms.

I also marked in green where you did a great job of building onto the head with a new form for the horn, and establishing how the addition connects to the existing structure in 3D space with an ellipse at the base. This is something I would love to see more of in your constructions.

When establishing your simple solid forms it is crucial that you "draw through" and complete each form. Don't cut them off where they pass behind one another or become obscured. I've marked an example on this treehopper where the abdomen just stops existing where it meets the thorax. We want to draw these forms in their entirety so we can develop a stronger understanding of how they fit together in 3D space, which we can explore by using a contour line to show where these forms intersect.

Continuing on, the next point I want to discuss covers how we go about building onto our constructions once the simple solid forms are in place.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Fortunately you don't cut back inside your forms very much, I've marked on your work here in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of the form you had already established for the thorax.

Another way of altering the silhouette of forms you have already drawn and flattening them out is by extending them with one-off lines or partial shapes, as highlighted in blue here which doesn't quite provide enough information for the viewer to understand how these new additions connect to the existing structures in 3D space.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Now, the last topic I need to talk about is how you're handling the texture and detail phase, once the construction is handled.

• Firstly I must restate the feedback from your lesson 3 submission: Avoid filling in large areas with black, such as this. This is not texture. It does not provide additional information about small textural forms on an object's surface, it actually removes information by obscuring your underlying construction, making it more difficult to asses your work and provide relevant feedback.

• Secondly, you're often filling in form shadows on your constructions. Please watch this video which explains the difference between form shadows and cast shadows, and why we only draw cast shadows when using texture in this course. You can also see an example in these diagrams using a sausage form. The top diagram shows the difference between a form shadow, on the sausage form itself, and a cast shadow, cast from the sausage form onto another surface. The lower diagram shows how this applies to adding texture. Rather than drawing the shadow cast by the sausage (we have already described the sausage form with construction, and its cast shadow would require filling a large area with black) we draw the shadows which are cast by small textural forms on the object's surface, implying their presence.

Your texture work has improved since your lesson 3 submission, as I do see some areas where you're implicitly describing surface texture using cast shadows, but there are a lot of places where, in effect, you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are a good section to review.

All right, I've brought up quite a few things to work on here, and I'd like you to address these points by completing some additional pages.

Please complete the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour curves.

• Two pages of insect/arachnid constructions- construction only.

• Two pages of insect/arachnid constructions- with the option to add texture if you'd like, but don't overdo it.